Christine and the Queens: the politics of dancing

Ever since disco mapped desire onto a thrusting, 4/4 beat, the club has been a symbol of personal freedom, glorification of the body and physical release. But as anyone who’s found themselves on an overcrowded dancefloor, cradling a drink protectively against the impersonal heave and shove, can attest, it’s easy to forget the politics enshrined within the act of, well, dancing. There’s no joy in a head-nod, no catharsis in a self-conscious bounce. That’s just shifting weight.

To watch Christine And The Queens is to realise what you’ve been missing. In spite of the name, CATQ is the singular vision of 28-year-old theatre school drop-out Héloïse Letissier. A massive – as in award-winning, fashion-mag-cover-star – deal in her native France, her debut album ‘Chaleur Humaine’ perfects a hybrid strain of art-pop as sharp and slanted as her former idol’s Klaus Nomi’s tailoring. Now, a string of star-making appearances, including the Graham Norton Show and Glastonbury, has seen the retooled, English language re-release going stratospheric in the UK too. But it’s on stage that Letissier unfolds her music into three dimensions; flanked by three dancers and her all-male backing band, she uses choreography to explode the record’s themes of identity, power and self-expression. Moves straight out of the playbooks of Michael Jackson, Willi Ninja and Bob Fosse accompany synth-driven production, pop cultural winks to club classics and off-beam lyrics about drawing a penis on your crotch. Ultimately, it’s a shot across the bow of laptop-wielding introverts and their armada of boredom – oh sure, Christine and the Queens may not be dance music in a narrow, four-to-the-floor sense, but Mixmag has a theory that its spirit, its DNA, its attitude is dance music at its most vital.

“Christine was born in the club,” Letissier affirms, when we test our theory backstage at Latitude. She’s just coming down from a set that saw her best-known song ‘Tilted’ get a minute-long ovation. “She was born there because I met those people that I couldn’t have met anywhere else. Those are places where people gather and belong.” The idea of Christine being a construct, ‘born’ as it were, is nothing new; pop has a long tradition of being a playground for theatre and art-school experimentation, from Ziggy Stardust to Sasha Fierce. But the idea of ‘belonging’ is crucial: on stage, Letissier assumes the role of megastar – you don’t, generally, get routines like that with Radio 1 C-listers – but also MC. She prefaces each performance by defining the venue’s parameters as a safe space, compelling the audience to “feel free to experiment” (she identifies as pansexual herself). At one memorable point at the start of ‘Science Fiction’ the stage is transformed into a club, spiky synths ricocheting as smoke engulfs the stage. “You want to go to Paris for the French discotheque?” she asks the crowd, vogue hands silhouetted against seedy, red light. You can almost smell the Gitanes singeing holes in the upholstery. You don’t have to know your duckwalk from your death drop to work it out: the club for Christine And The Queens stands for freedom.

But if she’s exultant onstage, offstage she’s a little awkward, battling shyness by telling jokes or making faces. At one point, asked what she learned from her time hanging with drag queens, a key plot point in her story, she deadpans: “Contouring”. The joke is given charge by the glint in her eye – and her downtime garb of men’s slacks and Fred Perry T-shirt. She proudly displays a layer of festival dust obscuring her tattoo (‘WE ACCEPT YOU’) and refuses, tellingly, to wipe it off. “I like to roll in the dirt,” she explains, gleefully, her accent veering into a clipped, British approximation for effect. When she says the club she was born in was the now-shuttered sleazepit cabaret venue Madame JoJo’s, it all falls into place.

Back in 2010, she’d arrived into London to escape a difficult break-up. What’s more, she’d just been expelled from her theatre school, École normale supérieure de Lyon, for defying her male teachers by staging her own play, something they’d forbidden. “It was misogynist,” she says. “They told me that I couldn’t be a stage director because I’m a girl: ‘You’re going to be an actress’”. London opened its arms to yet another outcast, and she took refuge at a queer night in Soho. “I was searching for my people, my family,” she recalls. In a plot twist that sounds like some footnote in a Warhol biography, Letissier was taken under the wing of three drag artists who encouraged her to catalyse her pain into something creative.
The Queens of her name? A tribute to the performers she met that night.

On her return to France she taught herself Logic and began reformatting her emotions into three-minute vignettes, processing influences ranging from club literate bands like Hot Chip and The Knife to – for ‘Chaleur Humaine’ at least – Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Good Kid M.A.A.D. City’. The central protagonist of these songs, Christine, enabled her to explore not only her then-current heartache, but internalised shame stretching back years. When the subject turns to Paris Is Burning, the seminal documentary that told the stories of a set of poor, black and Latino New Yorkers who found expression through the playacting and performance of ballroom culture, she’s quick to draw parallels. “I saw it six years ago and I thought it was incredibly moving, this idea of creating a safe space,” she says. “Vogue is about that. It’s about owning what’s stolen from you. [Christine And The Queens] is the same for me. Even as a young girl I was like, well, if I’m not wanted like that...”

To understand this pain, you need to go back a bit. Born in Nantes, to liberal parents, she was a creative child who took ballet lessons from age four but also wrote stories, poems and drew. She was, she says, content. “I loved studying, and I used humour as a way of being accepted quite early on,” she recalls. “People asked me to write their love letters. I was like Cyrano de Bergerac, behind the pretty ladies, writing.” However, as she reached adolescence, pressure from society began to bite and whatever truce she had with herself ended. “It was hard, I felt surrounded by secret injunctions from society to be something I was not,” she says, her eyes wide. “I felt too dirty, too queer, too weird.” Unsurprisingly, the first iteration of Christine was much darker than the redemptive pop she performs now; in a short film she created to accompany her debut, the self-released EP ‘Miséricorde’, a camera is fixed on her impassive face as she watches Cabaret in the pitch black. “That was my dark Berlin, Klaus Nomi phase,” she says, grinning slyly. Her performance style was different, too, with elements of the absurdist comedian Andy Kauffman. “I was alone with my computer and I was launching tracks in Logic and –“ she affects an elaborate, stage whisper – “I didn’t know how to use Logic then, so it was stopping all the time. I would emphasise the awkwardness of the long pauses by watching people, like… ” She locks me with an exaggerated stare. It is uncomfortable. But it’s the dancing that remains the most potent symbol of her taking back her autonomy. For her current tour she’s recruited dancers from different disciplines: a voguer, a hip hop dancer and a breakdancer. The idea was to compliment her own style of movement: borne out of improv, finessed with choreographer Marion Moton, but always coming from a specific place: “I have the impression that my energy comes from the moment of pure anger,” she reveals. “Being on stage is about remembering that, for me.”

As she’s become more comfortable in her skin – and you sense Christine is a potent vessel for self-discovery – the early distancing tactics and angular, Atelier-crafted suits have become something less forced. “Now I’m a bit more physical – I feel like an athlete and a young boy, and I have more muscles!” She flexes a bicep for emphasis. She envisions pushing this further, too: “I actually want to be this macho female. I’m kind of obsessed by it. The only woman who was both feminine and really macho was Madonna. In the 90s she was taking the lead, desiring everyone.” In an example of pop’s feedback loop, Madonna recently invited her on stage in France during ‘Unapologetic Bitch’ for a short routine incorporating some dramatised spanking and an exchange which culminated in Madonna handing her a banana as a thank-you gift. “She likes to test people, so I put the banana in my pants like a dick and I asked her out.” Mixmag must look shocked because she leaps to her own defence: “I dunno why! - I - I - I … that’s me on stage. I lose every inhibition I have!” Then she gathers her limbs back in, raises an eyebrow. “I ate the banana afterwards because I was stressed out.” Christine And The Queens, ladies and gentlemen.

Towards the end of our chat, she brings up her favourite French album, Serge Gainsbourg’s disco-inspired opus ‘Love On The Beat’. With its odes to prostitutes and New York queer clubs, it remains one of his most contentious releases. Which, of course, is precisely what Letissier likes about it. Just as the club irrevocably shaped Christine And The Queens, she envisions teaching the club how to find its feet again, in turn: “I do want to bring back this raw sexuality that can happen in clubs, like sweaty ways of relating purely physically. Because clubbing is about finding your physicality again, liking your body.” It’s a message that bears repeating, particularly in light of Orlando, an attack on the very idea of personal freedom that Christine and the Queen champions – the cornerstone that dance music was built on. Re-listening to her record in light of our conversation, one track stands out. Driven by a house beat, its lyrics will resonate with anyone who has found succour, refuge or just a few hours of escape on a Friday night: “And as I shake my crumbled bones, I’m safe and holy, safe and holy.”

Christine And The Queens ‘Chaleur Humaine’ is out now on Because